The Angel Gabriel From Heaven Came
by cip
Summary: SPOILERS FOR SEASON 5! Castiel and his brother have a much needed talk. Rating is for a swearword or two


**SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!! ****SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!!**

**This is what happens at nearly two AM ^_^ **

**I had this in my mind the moment I saw last week's episode and now I finally couldn't hold back from writing it up any longer! Betaed by my ever-wonderful Manu whom I love ever so much!!! I also suppose I'm going to have to dedicate this to my little Squiditypie, since she gets crotchety if I don't (love you to Squid!).**

**BTW I don't want any flames on the views expressed in this story please. I'm a Christian and I don't entirely agree with what I've written (although maybe to some extent...) I just wrote it for the lulz ^_^ **

**But on that note I will call you squishy and you shall be my squishy should you review :D Who wants to be my Squishy??? *holds out arms ready to hug*.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own the carol, I don't own finding Nemo and I don't own Supernatural. The archangel Gabriel and Castiel own themselves and would probably try o destroy the planet if they knew what silly people like me were writing about them.... ^_^**

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**The angel Gabriel from heaven came,  
his wings as drifted snow, his eyes as flame;  
"All hail," said he, "thou lowly maiden Mary,  
most highly favoured lady," Gloria!**

**Words: Basque carol;  
trans. Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924)**

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It was one of those nights where there was truly nothing special about the world. On occasion there would be nights when the moon would shine down and bathe everything it touched in a soft white glow. Other times, a storm would rip through the darkening skies and fill the world with its roaring fury.

Or you got a night like this – it got dark, street lights go on, end of story. So much for pathetic fallacy.

Garish neon light from a nearby street lamp shone through curtains that were too thin to do their job and illuminated one of the world's very many cheap hotel rooms. Crappy wallpaper, dirty toilet, smell of stale cigarettes – only someone who really didn't give a damn would spend a night here. Or two someones, either way, it was a dump.

The sleeping humps under the tatty duvets and a reverberating snore from one of the men attested to the hour of the night, and that sleep was the only thing on a sane person's agenda. This being the case, it would seem strange then to note the shadowed figure in the corner of the room – his back to the unwashed window and useless curtains.

Castiel watched the two humans with an apathetic gaze, his mind skimming over the day's somewhat hectic events. Hectic being a minor word, but he supposed angels weren't allowed to use such terms as 'fucked-up'.

Sometimes having siblings made life very complicated indeed. The sooner he found his Father the better...

_Tap tap._

What the?

Re-focussing back on the present, the angel glanced around the room. Dean rolled over in his bed with a grunt and Sam was still snoring, but nothing seemed out of place. He frowned as the little noise continued. Maybe rats..? But he would have been aware of them long before he saw the little creatures. Water system perhaps?

_TAP!_

He swung round. Or maybe someone outside the window.

A moment later he was stood on the other side of said window, his long coat now moving slightly in the dull breeze.

"I would have thought tapping on a window in the middle of the night is a little below you." He stated icily.

"I thought I'd give you a little warning rather than just turning up out of the blue."

"Unlike earlier."

Gabriel's face darkened. "Those boys chased _me_. I just...led them on a little."

Castiel scowled at his brother. "What do you want? If you're after the Winchesters again..." He let the threat hang, but to his annoyance Gabriel just leant against the wall in an unconcerned fashion and pulled a lollipop out of his trouser pocket.

"The Winchesters? You think I'll take them on twice in a day?" He pulled the wrapper off the sweet and twirled the stick in his fingers. "I don't know if you've noticed but somehow they always end up winning." He stuck the lollipop in his mouth and folded his arms. "No, it's you I've come to see, my dear baby brother."

"Don't call me that." Castiel's growl was low and filled with venom as he spat the sentence at the other angel. "I thought you'd been _dead_ these past two thousand years! Then I find out that you've been pretending to be a Trickster all this time! Slow dancing aliens?! Killing Dean over a hundred times?! You had no right to do that! Let alone just turn up again and start messing around with the apocalypse."

"Right, just like _you_ haven't been trying to save this miserable little planet?" Gabriel flicked the sweet from one cheek to the other with a slurp that drew a disgusted look from Castiel. "And if you thought I was dead I fail to see how that's my problem." He grinned sweetly. "Do me a favour; don't tell Michael I'm back."

"Michael's not around at the moment."

"I've noticed. I'll have to have another talk with Dean about that."

Gabriel was slammed hard into the wall he'd been balancing against, an invisible force pressing hard onto his chest as his brother snarled at him.

"Don't you _dare_ go near Dean or Sam again!"

The archangel laughed, although it sounded a little choked as he struggled against Castiel's hold. "You really think you could _possibly_ stop me? You're an angel of Thursday, Cas. Not even _the_ angel, just _an_ angel. What good do you think you could do against _me_?" He managed to lift his arm and swept it round in an expansive gesture. "What good can you do against the _apocalypse_ for Father's sake?!"

"I can _try_!" Castiel let his brother drop, knowing full well that the archangel could have broken the hold himself with barely any effort. "Which is more than you're doing."

A pained expression crossed Gabriel's features fleetingly, before he masked it with his more usual shit-eating grin. "You want to lecture me on trying to save the world, Cas? _Me?!"_ He laughed, and had the human brothers been awake to hear it they would have been surprised at the bitterness in the 'Trickster's' mirth.

"You say you've thought me dead for two thousand years." The archangel hissed, "Well maybe I wish I had been!" He turned away from the lesser angel and tilted his head to look up at the sky. It was cloudy, and standing so near to a streetlamp meant that all there really was to see was the light bouncing back from the clouds to create a disturbing orange glow, but he stared up none the less. "Saving the world? I once thought I was going to be able to herald just such an event, but was I ever so _wrong_?!" He glanced back at his brother, the uncharacteristic look of pain back on his face. "I remember so well, Cas. Do you even know what it's _like_ to have done what I've done?"

Castiel took an involuntary step backwards as his brother turned back round to face him and the archangel's wings slowly unfurled themselves.

Much has been written of the archangel Gabriel – and quite a lot made up – but one thing that had seemed to stick was the physical description of his angelic form. Worlds apart from little girls in white dresses with tinsel glued to their heads, the angel retained the body he'd been using for years in his trickster guise, but behind him his large, snow-white wings uncurled themselves.

White wings weren't a cliché for angels, at least not for Gabriel. There was nothing cutesy or even remotely fluffy about the huge structures that spanned nearly twenty meters in length. Powerful muscles and sharp – almost barbed – feathers, these were the wings belonging to a warrior.

And yet, much like Castiel's own, they appeared like shadows – the one closest to the hotel passing through the wall and into the room like a ghost. Should the Winchesters have woken they would have found themselves surrounded by crisp, white feathers.

"You have no idea Cas." And there was the other thing, not yet lost to posterity; Gabriel's eyes glowed as if with hellfire – an oxymoron that served such a character well. "You talk about saving the world? Well I tried to. I followed my orders and thought that by doing so this pitiful race you call mankind would be granted salvation!" His wings beat lazily in the air, although only Castiel felt the disturbance they made to the night breeze. "I was the one who appeared to that young woman over two thousand years ago! I was the one who told her what was to come. And you know what? _It didn't make any difference!!!_" He laughed derisively. "I've seen what passes for Scriptures nowadays – and none of it portrays how it was; her fear, her joy. Do you remember what used to happen to women who bore a child out of wedlock in those days? She faced stoning if her fiancé hadn't been such a decent guy!" He looked up at the heavens again, wings outstretched. "And on that night the Child was born...I was so overjoyed! I truly believed that salvation had come! When I heard the Baby make its first cry I stretched out my hand-" He mimicked the action. "- and collapsed a red giant into a supernova so that the light shone out over Him. I flew across the hills of the town shouting to all that I could find about the miracle that had come to save humanity – I scared a group of shepherds out of their _wits_..." Gabriel's hand fell slowly back to his side and his gaze fell back to Castiel. "And do you know what? I watched Him grow up, watched Him preach the word of the Lord, reach out to those in need, make the world a better place to be in...

And then I had to watch them torture Him. Whip Him, hammer nails through Him, suffocate Him, spear Him...And I was forbidden to help."

And just like that the wings and fire were gone. All that stood there was a sad little man with a lollipop in his mouth and his hands now shoved into his trouser pockets.

"You know why that had to happen." Castiel said softly. "You know why He died."

Gabriel laughed mirthlessly. "Yes, I do. And do you know what? It wasn't worth it." He kicked angrily at the ground, leaving barely a dent although knowing full well he had the power to reduce the tarmac to atoms should he want to. "I've spent two thousand years living, if not _as_ a human than at least _with_ them. I've watched millions, maybe _billions_ suffer and die because they can't decide now if what they wrote down was right, if how their services are done is _right._ Fifteenth century England - Christians were burning each other over which _human_ they should follow in the church. Pardon me for asking but isn't the church about following God? And that was one of the _tamer_ examples of the stupidity that's followed His ascension."

He gazed hard at Castiel, and for a moment the fire flickered again in his eyes. "So by all means, little bro, go and try to find Dad, try to save the world. _I_ say give Dean and Sam to their respective people, _make_ them carry out their roles and we can all sit there in the front row seats with popcorn and watch the world burn as our big bros fight it out. But just ask yourself this: Is humanity worth saving? Does it _deserve_ saving?"

"They are our Father's children; that makes them worthy."

Gabriel bowed his head mockingly. "An interesting moral dilemma then, and one I shall leave you with." He pulled the lollipop stick from his mouth and threw it onto the ground.

"That's called littering."

"So sue me. Now do excuse me brother dear, I have some jerks to mind-fuck, a cake to eat and an apocalypse to watch. So nice catching up, we must do this again sometime. Ciao."

There was a thunderclap – which was purely for dramatic reasons – and Castiel found himself once again alone in the car park.

Well, if nothing else he knew one thing that had been puzzling him earlier in the night: going by Gabriel's example, angels were allowed to swear.

"Fuck!"

It made him feel slightly better about what now seemed to be a seriously messed up situation. And at the back of his mind a part of him wept to see his brother reduced to such a pitiful creature. Maybe if humans could have a glimpse of the real Gabriel then children's nativity plays would probably be a whole lot different.

And contain a lot more sweets.


End file.
